through morning mist, and gradually settling into vivid outline and detail.

There is a good deal of mannerism in Poe's versification. He is He is very fond of making use of the refrain; and he sometimes lingers on the same lines and cadences in a way which palls upon the ear. The poem entitled The Bells sets out with a peculiar music of its own; but before its close it has degenerated into something almost like nursery rhymes. Here is its first stanza :— Hear the sledges with the bells

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells ꞌ
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

While the stars that oversprinkle

All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically swells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells—

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

The second stanza is given to wedding bells, the third to alarum bells, the fourth to bells tolled for the dead. It will require an admiration of Poe's poetry more enthusiastic than ours to discern anything but jingle and absurdity in the latter lines of this fourth verse. The 'King of the Ghouls,' it appears, 'dances and yells

To the throbbing of the bells,

Of the bells, bells, bells,-
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,

In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells,
To the tolling of the bells,

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells,—

To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

The flow of all Poe's verses is remarkable for ease and gracefulness it is hardly ever hampered by the difficulties of rhyme and rhythm which exist to a great degree in the metres of which he makes use. The stanzas which we have already quoted from The Raven have afforded those readers who are not familiar with the poem some notion of the singular character of its We shall quote another specimen of it :

measure.

But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour : Nothing farther then he uttered; not a feather then he flut

tered,

Till I scarcely more than muttered, Other friends have flown

before,―

On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before." Then the bird said, 'Nevermore.'

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, ‘Doubtless,' said I, 'what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master, whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster, till his songs one burden bore,

Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore,

Of "Never, Nevermore."

Of the four large volumes which contain Poe's works, only a small portion of one is taken up by his poetry. That occupies no more than one hundred pages out of two thousand. The first volume consists

of tales the second contains the poetry, Eureka, one or two critical papers, and tales: the third volume is occupied by short critical sketches of almost all the authors of America, and of a few English authors, among whom are Macaulay, Dickens, Lever, and Mrs. Browning. The fourth volume contains a most shocking and repulsive tale of shipwreck and starvation at sea, entitled Arthur Gordon Pym, and more tales of a similar character to those in the preceding volumes. Arthur Gordon Pym is Poe's only attempt at a narrative of any length.

Mr. Griswold has forewarned us not to attach much weight to any of Poe's critical opinions; and a perusal of his critical essays leads us to the belief that his ability did not at all lie in that way. They are almost entirely taken up by minute verbal fault-finding: there is hardly anything like the discussion of principles; and many of the papers are evidently dictated by personal spite, and afford us a very unfavourable notion of the tone of American journalism. It is to be hoped that Poe's writings are not a fair specimen of the courtesy, or lack of courtesy, with which literary men across the Atlantic are wont to speak or write of one another. Of the editor of a rival magazine Poe remarks

Mr. Brown had, for the motto on his magazine cover, the words of Richelieu,

Men call me cruel,

I am not; -I am just.

Here the two monosyllables an ass' should have been appended. They were no doubt omitted through one of those d- ―d typographical blunders which, through life, have been at once the bane and antidote of Mr. Brown.-(Vol. iii. pp. 103-4 )

Equally unsatisfactory are the glimpses of American manners with which these critical papers furnish us. The following is Poe's account of a certain John W. Francis, whom Poe evidently regarded as a very Chesterfield :

His address is the most genial that can be conceived-its bonhommie irresistible. He never waits for an introduction to anybody; slaps a perfect stranger on the back, and calls him 'doctor' or 'learned Theban;' pats every lady on the head, and (if she be pretty and petite) designates her by some such title as My Pocket Edition of the Lives of the Saints !

But Poe's great power lay in writing tales, which rank in a class by themselves, and have their characteristics strongly defined. They inculcate no moral lesson; they delineate no character; they are utterly away from nature or experience: their sole end is to interest and excite; and this end is aimed at for the most part by the use of all the appliances of horror. They are sometimes extremely coarse in taste, though never impure in morality. They are often calculated to jar on all human fecling; and when read they leave an indescribably eerie and strange impression upon the mind. Yet they possess such interest as spell-binds the reader; and if read alone and late at night, we venture to say that one could as readily shake off the nightmare as pause in the middle of one of these appalling narratives. There are some humorous tales, which are generally very unsuccessful; though the effect of the serious is often heightened by the infusion of a grotesque and maniac mirth. Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe are nowhere in the race with

Poe. His imagination was so vivid that he appears to have seen all the horrors he describes; and he sets them before his readers with such terrible graphic power that no nervous person should read his works except by broad daylight, and with a whole family in the room. He gives all his narratives an extraordinary veri-similitude by a circumstantiality of detail which surpasses that of Robinson Crusoe or Sir Edward Seaward; and although the relation is almost always extravagant and impossible, one needs occasionally to pause and recollect, to avoid being carried away by the air of truthfulness and simplicity with which the story is told. Sometimes the interest is made to depend on following up a close chain of reasoning; and often we find that description of magnificence and that gloating over imaginary wealth which are not unusual in the writings of men possessing a rich fancy amid the res angustæ domi. And at all times the language in which the description or the narrative is carried on is almost unparalleled for its exquisite clearness, precision, and

nerve.

We have already alluded to a piece entitled The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, as one which excited great interest when it was published, and which was translated into almost all the languages of Europe. It is an example of the author's power of balancing an extraordinary and impossible narrative by an appearance of anxiety to tell the simple truth, and by minute circumstantiality in narrating it, which led to the story being very generally believed.

M. Valdemar, a friend of Poe, was in the last stage